The Thrill is Gone

by
Michael Jinkins
| May 18, 2015

The year was 1969. I was sixteen. The moment is scorched into my mind. Ben Norrod and I are sitting in his room listening to a recording that would go on to win a Grammy Award in 1970 and eventually earn a coveted place on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of Greatest Songs of All Time: “The Thrill is Gone.” Ben and I were both musicians, and we listened to that record until the grooves nearly wore away.

B.B. King’s voice was like gravel and honey. And Lucille, his Gibson guitar named for a woman who caused a barroom brawl and conflagration early in his career, well, she sang with a voice all her own. B.B. said he played his solos in the higher register because his hearing wasn’t very good and that way he could hear Lucille sing. Together they made up the greatest musical team in history.

I grew up in deep East Texas on a diet of music that knew no categories except “good” and “bad.” We were catholic listeners, and we loved them all from Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys to Muddy Waters. Great music poured out of East Texas dance halls I was told never to visit and radio stations from Houston and New Orleans. There was so much great music. But B.B. was unique, and we loved him uniquely. As I moved from one band to another in those days of late nights and long music sessions and other things that will remain hidden in history, from pick-up bands that stayed together just long enough to play one dance to groups that lasted a year or two, covering everything from Blood, Sweat and Tears standards to Bob Dylan, Elton John and James Taylor, B.B. King was a fixed point on a compass that spun like it was driven by the winds of change.

My children, Jeremy and Jessica, were brought up on B.B. King along with a lot of other great rock, country, blues, R&B, and jazz. When the kids were teenagers, Debbie gave me a Father’s Day gift of a day with them at an all-day Austin City Limits Blues concert. Debbie and Jessica had to leave before Buddy Guy and B.B. came on stage in the evening, but Jeremy and I were there to see the King of Blues, by then too old to stand for long. He sat on a stool and sang and played. His fingers were not as quick as they once had been, but even then his voice was pure magic, transporting us from Austin to the Mississippi Delta that his heart never entirely left.

The great irony of the blues is just how happy it makes you to play it. The blues draws you in and reminds you that being human isn’t easy, loving isn’t easy, and neither is dying. We are not alone in our unease. Others have the blues too. There’s a community of the blues, and it is not limited by age, creed or race.

I know this may seem sacrilegious to some people to say this, but when I heard that B.B. died, I couldn’t help but remember something Daniel Patrick Moynihan said when his friend President John F. Kennedy was murdered. Someone said to Moynihan, “We’ll never be happy again.” To which Moynihan responded, “We’ll be happy again. But we’ll never be young again.”

Over the next several days and maybe weeks, I’ll be listening to B.B. King a lot. Listening and remembering. And I will be very sad. I know I’ll be happy again, but there’s no way to recapture that moment at sixteen when Ben and I huddled round that record player and thrilled for the first time.